


(Un)Dateable

by resurrectionmercy



Category: overwatch
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Love Confessions, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-10
Updated: 2018-06-10
Packaged: 2019-05-20 12:03:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14894298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/resurrectionmercy/pseuds/resurrectionmercy
Summary: After an enemy projectile disrupts Angela's regenerative abilities, she falls ill; Genji stays with her, unwilling to leave her alone with her discomforts.





	(Un)Dateable

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr prompt. Also a ventfic, because guess who's been sick for three damn weeks straight? Yeah, that'd be me, the Mercy main. Hi.

* * *

 

It’s late, well past ten in the evening - after a mission, most of them would be in bed at this hour. Yet here they are, both her and Genji, in the medical bay; the cyborg busying himself with the drink dispenser, the day’s newspaper, and a blanket-covered chair as if he’s set to move in, and Angela, well, cross-legged on the elevated hospital bed with multiple plush pillows piled behind her back. It’s uncomfortable. Unbelievable, really; it’s as if she’s forgotten completely what it feels like to be ill. All these years she’s tended the sick and the wounded and truly, she’s seen it all, but a mere cold, at worst a flu, something so ordinary and mundane and, most of all, survivable, now feels to her like she’s dying.

How long has it been? Fifteen years?

The puncture wound in her lower back aches like a gunshot wound, only so much smaller, like the infected bite of a mosquito or a horse-fly. It throbs with her fever-stricken everything, a drumming inside her brain and bones, an ache in her muscles, and she sniffs idly with glassed-over eyes, finding the whole situation… ironic, almost amusing. No, whatever was in that dart wasn’t  _poisonous_. It did nothing but stunt her body’s artificially improved regeneration rates, her boosted immunity system, perhaps in the hopes that she’d get shot or just break a bone, leaving her vulnerable or, in the best case scenario for Talon, dead. What she’d actually become was just… sick, like her stellar immunity collapsing on her meant nothing to the lurking germs sticking to her but the open opportunity they’d waited for for a good half of her lifespan. Suddenly, it was as if her basic, unmodified biology no longer knew how to handle a simple virus.

This was a flaw in the design of the regenerative design she’d previously regarded as a succesful experiment. She’d realised it the first thing after noticing the aches in her joints, the thickness in her throat, and the slowly growing soreness everywhere. She’d have to fix that, this sudden immunity collapse syndrome, at once when she wouldn’t be shaking madly with the sickness anymore. When her brain worked again. When  _something_  worked again.

Everyone had been quite concerned. They couldn’t recall ever seeing her sick and even though surely they had, they may have not noticed it; sickness had never stopped her from working, she’d just chosen projects that didn’t risk her patients on those days, or her colleagues. Sickness made her antisocial, brought her mind back to the workings of her own body, what it was going through, and how she could turn this intimate knowledge of the process of the illness in her and the stages her body took towards recovery into the building bricks of medical science. Even now, that was where her mind had been, and perhaps it was that fact that had calmed the team down in the end. They’d all gone to bed, hadn’t they? She’d told them she’d be fine self-medicating and sleeping the fever off in the medical bay, and they’d told her they’d see her in the morning, wished her a swift recovery, and disappeared into their little holes inside the Watchpoint like a strike team of exhausted foxes.

Everyone except Genji.

He’s got tan lines over his cheeks and forehead, Angela notes as he sits on the side of her bed, offering her a steaming cup of hot chocolate from the dispenser. It’s summertime, and after settling in, after growing comfortable with his companions once more, he’s spent quite some time outdoors with his visor off. She wonders if sunlight still hurts his modified eyes; she didn’t quite know how to fix that after the repairs, after the  _improvements._  She simply told him to get used to it.

Retrospectively, she always felt guilty about that, yet - he doesn’t seem to squint as much anymore, if at all.

“I am afraid it is not Swiss. I keep disappointing,” Genji says with a hint of a grin.

She chuckles, rolls her eyes and lets out a gentle cough that masks the desperate pressure in her throat demanding a much bigger, much sharper relief. She’s not holding it back for him as much as for her own body’s sake; she’ll cough hard when it helps some, but for now, the only thing it does is bruise her from the inside out.

“Silly. I wouldn’t be able to taste it, even if it was Swiss - my body will hardly know the difference,” Angela huffs in response, bringing the cup to her lips and taking the smallest sip to try how hot the drink is.

Quite.

Genji chuckles.  
“Are you telling me that there are no magical healing qualities to Swiss chocolate, Angela? For all the praise you’ve had for it…”

“I am telling you that, yes.”  
She thinks it over for a moment before taking another sip and placing the mug between her crossed legs, over the baby blue blanket thrown over her.  
“You do know that I will do just fine on my own, Genji. Go to bed.”

“No,” Genji replies casually, picking up his own blanket; it’s fuzzier, and sand brown; “I’ll stay here. I know you would do just fine on your own, Angela, but it is a special kind of loneliness, being alone when you are feeling under the weather. So I will be here and accompany you, so you can focus on getting better. It is what a friend would do, is it not?”

She smiles. Then, slowly, she nods.  
“I had forgotten all about that. I never let myself have it; my career left no time for sick leaves, and it left very little time for friendship, too. So I worked while I was ill and… the kindness you’re showing me is like remembering something from childhood. All those nights as a little girl, with my mother or my father bringing me cold medicine or soup to eat.”

It takes her a moment to get back to the present day, but when she does, she sees Genji tilting his head with a gentle expression on his face.  
“Tell me more,” he prompts her, “I have never heard you speak of your childhood.”

A quiet chuckle escapes her and she shakes her head, lowering her gaze to her steaming drink on her lap. She waits for some time, perhaps for her mind to start working again, to form a thought one way or the other, but it seems - feels - as if there’s some technical issue with her functions, the whole of her mind reduced to a blank state of white noise. Finally, she brings the mug up to her lips again, shaking a little at the contrast of the hot drink touching her otherwise so cold-feeling body.

“There is not much to tell, Genji. Or - perhaps there is, but it all seems quite mundane and so distant that I wouldn’t know what to talk about. Surely you have similar experiences. Surely nothing I had was that special. I had a mother and a father once, and I was small, and I was cared for and sometimes I was sick, and my mother would sit by my bed singing me lullabies, my father would read me lighthearted poetry from children’s books, and I - would fall asleep and have nightmares. I had a lot of nightmares as a child, from fevers, I remember that being the worst part of being ill. Strange dreams, that you wouldn’t think were scary; objects from the real world beginning to spin around the room, levitating. Impossible things. My blankets and bed turning to thorns. Those dreams scared me then, but I grew out of them.”

She lifts her gaze and examines him.

“What about you? Would you share some memories from your past with me, too?”

Genji’s eyes narrow, but the lingering smile on him is both thoughtful and a little bit amused, as if she’s challenged him.

“When I was a child,” he begins then, “being sick was the only time when my brother would stop pushing me around. Literally. I was our father’s favourite as a young boy - he gave me much of the attention he would not give to my brother, who had to be raised tough for the future of our bloodline, you see. So maybe I was raised like a little girl, too. I did not care for poetry, however. I remember playing video games and being bored out of my mind through illnesses, my body going through phases of fever chills and floods of sweating… Funny, I have not recalled these things in a long time. I have not had to.”

He eyes her, and a small chuckle escapes him as well.

“I suppose that is on you, Doctor Ziegler?”

Angela nods slowly.  
“Your body’s regenerative abilities -”

“I understand.”

They’re silent for some time, and Angela leans her sore back into the pillows, rests her head and breathes deep, as deep as her itchy lungs allow her from the spasms in her chest threatening her with coughing fits. No, not yet, she tells her body and relaxes; all of that will come soon enough.

“I quite missed your company,” Genji tells her then, his voice softer, quieter now, as if he’s either not quite sure how to approach this subject, or if he’s not sure if she’s asleep and doesn’t want to wake her up.

She peers at him lazily through a partially opened eye, then closes it again, nodding. The nod compresses her throat and she coughs unwillingly, but it passes quickly, letting her relax again.

“It seems strange, all those years we exchanged letters and yet I feel as if I am just now meeting you for the first time,” the cyborg continues.

“It is all quite different since we last met, face to face,” she mumbles, cheekbones burning with fever and most her attention directed towards the fact, “Much has changed; we are older, but we are also very different people. You are no longer lost, and I am no longer an overgrown child.”

“Was I lost when we last met? Were you an overgrown child?” Genji asks her, his voice amused.

“Would you contest either of those claims?” she asks him back.

He thinks for a moment.  
“No,” he says then; “With confidence, I can say that I was lost. And perhaps I saw you differently then, but now that I have met you once more, you are indeed a woman. I am not quite sure I saw you that way before. You were my doctor, but you were very young, and you seemed out of your comfort zone, even when you were the most experienced person in the room, doing what only you could do.”

“Precisely. I have grown since, Genji. Not quite like you have, and yet, if I could meet my younger self from those days, I would have much advice to give that silly girl.”

They look at each other, and there’s warmth in Genji’s eyes, acceptance, and somehow, Angela realises she needed to see that. She smiles at him before reaching for her hot chocolate again.

“Back then it seemed absurd that there is merely a year or so between us,” she says then; “in my eyes you seemed - immature. Boyish, as if you were stuck in the worst of your teenage years. And I was not done growing up myself. I quite never gave myself the chance to experience youth, and I suppose that made me young for a very long time in the developmental sense. I thought I could bypass the nonsense that other teenagers got caught up in, so that when I turned 20, then 25, all that unspoken rebellion and most of all the confusion and insecurity that I’d never worked through was still there. Yet I still thought of myself above you, because my way of carrying myself was so controlled, so pretentiously mature, and you were caught up in your unpredictable moods like you had no skills in fighting them. Trauma does that to people, and yet I allowed myself to think that this was simply who you were. A silly boy, to project away the truth that I was also a silly girl inside. I hope my words don’t offend you.”

Genji shakes his head.  
“No. If you’d spoken them to me then, I would have become very angry, but I see the truth in what you say today. I was very lost and I was very afraid, Angela. Perhaps I took much of that out on you.”

“You were angry at me very often.”

“You were safe to be angry at. And you had that annoying professional smile every time that just made me more frustrated. I hated that smile, the way it implied that you pitied me, the way it highlighted how unstable I was, how it made me aware of my behaviour. I hated it, and I knew that you wouldn’t leave me if I showed just how much.”

She nods.  
“You are not angry anymore,” she says.

“And you don’t give me that professional smile either,” Genji tells her, his eyes twinkling.

She laughs, a careless act that leads to another cough. When she recovers, she nods again, barely noticing the man’s fingers touching her arm with concern and affection. 

“Trust me,” she says to him, “I am even more capable of giving that look today than I was back then; that pained look covering up my frustration with a difficult patient. I give that same smile to my male colleagues who think they can outperform me by the grace of their XY chromosomes as well. I have practiced it, Genji, and I have practiced it long and hard.”

He lifts his brows, looking playful.  
“Which must mean that I do not frustrate you anymore. Am I wrong?”

“You are quite correct. In fact, I find myself quite fond of your company. I was nervous to meet you again after all these years; what if we wouldn’t have the kind of a - how would I describe it? That kind of a  _connection_  that was so apparent to me through our letters. I waited for them so eagerly each time, but the thought of seeing you in person after being separated for such a long time…”

“The fear that the person you were in writing would not be the person you were in flesh, I understand. I felt that too. I had butterflies in my stomach when I landed here, in fact, and the worst of them I felt when I had to shake your hand.”

Her smile softens, turns quite strangely gentle. She feels it linger on her lips even when she runs out of words, as if he’s said everything there is to say.

“Angela,” he begins then, if only to prove her wrong; “I have a confession to make.”

“And what would that be?” she asks him, sipping her drink with her eyes never leaving his.

He seems more confident now, but there’s a tension in his act of relaxedness, a relapse to that nervous tension he described before.

“There is another reason I was so nervous to meet you once more. It is a long story but I think the sum of it is very short indeed. Would you mind if I spoke it now, or would you rather sleep off the fever, and talk with me once you are in a clearer state of mind?”

Angela squints at him, then shakes her head.  
“My mind is quite functional. I would not work with it, but when it comes to mere interaction, I am not that far gone quite yet.”

He smiles at her, but his smile shivers and shrinks fast, and he seems to second-guess his intentions before regaining confidence.

“That boy you knew years ago, Angela, grew quite fond of you. He would always wish that perhaps we would have a chance to meet again under different circumstances, when he wasn’t quite so angry, and when you wouldn’t see him as that bed-bound project that he felt like then. After all, you were a girl, and he was a boy, and you spent much time together outside the professional framework. He enjoyed those times and when he left this place, those were the times he regretted losing the most.”

Her breath hitches a little, matching the inconvenient pause between her heartbeats, but she says nothing; the cold that grows in her fingertips, her toes and the tip of her nose has nothing to do with the fever chills now.

“That’s why he sent you the first letter,” Genji continues. “Over time, that boy became me, and his affections became my affections. I don’t feel the same way about you as he did, for many things changed since, and the girl he knew is not the woman who sits before me tonight. And yet, the affection is still there, and like myself, it grew over time, and as I learned more about you, it seemed to feed off all those new, wonderful things that I discovered. This is an awful time to ask, Angela, but I was wondering if, once you are feeling less ill, you’d like to have dinner together, or perhaps watch a movie with me? This - I promise you I used to be much better at this, but I also promise that I am doing my best, and yes, I am asking you out for a date. Of course if you’d rather do these things only as friends I understand and I would not mind, and -”

“Genji.”  
Angela closes her eyes, slipping deeper into her bed; the pillows rub at her raw back and her throat feels sandpapery and sickly, but for the time being, the dizziness, the cold, and the frantic beating of her heart aren’t connected to the illness.  
“I have a lot on my mind right now, but the first thing I found myself asking while listening to your rambling was that I can’t quite believe you are looking at me like this, with my swollen eyes and red nose and disheveled hair and dry lips, and yet decide to ask me out anyway.”

He gasps a little, physically pulling back from her.  
“Oh,” he says clumsily, “I - I understand, I should have waited, I don’t want it to look like I’m trying to pressure you while you’re not feeling up to it, I’m... very sorry, Angela, that was not my intention.”

She throws a bored look at him, her eyes unfocused but judgemental.  
“Calm your nerves,” she tells him, but there’s a hint of amusement to her harsh tone, “Like I said, I am quite in my right mind. What I am not is in my right anything else; I am a sniffling, sneezing, coughing, gooey mess of sweat. And yet, you see this, and you think, yes, this is still the woman I would like to take to movies with me.”

Genji’s quiet now, quite still; she enjoys the confused, yet increasingly hopeful look on his features.

“Of course I’ll join you for a dinner, or a movie, or a dinner  _and_  a movie, once my condition improves. I would like nothing better, Genji. As friends, or else; we will have to find out about the details later. Who knows? You are charming, and I’ve more than occasionally felt weak in your presence, or inspired, or yet something wholly different. I didn’t think you might feel something like it too - I never let myself linger on it, thinking it inappropriate.”

“Inappropriate?” Genji lets out, and by the sound of it, the word is his first exhale in a very long time.

She nods.  
“Trappings of my profession, I fear. I quite simply don’t see myself as... dateable. Psychologically speaking, I think that may be something I need to work on in the future.”

A breathless laughter escapes the cyborg, and he shakes his head.  
“Trust me,” he says, his eyes playful once more as he looks at her, “You are quite dateable indeed.”


End file.
